How does it make you feel to hold a book in your hand?
I'm talking today not about story, or plot, or characters, or motivation or MacGuffins or butlers or international intrigue. I'm talking about the actual, physical artifact that is a book.
Do you prefer hardcover, trade paper, or mass market? (Mass markets, to me, have always smelled funny.)
If you read hardcovers, do you take the dust jacket off first, and set it aside? (I do.) Do you notice the stamp on the spine of the book? Do you like it when it's gold, silver, or black? What about stamping on the front board, like William Morrow does (with, for instance, Sean Chercover's Barry, Anthony, and Macavity Award-nominated Trigger City)?
When you read a trade paperback, do you notice the quality of the paper? Does it bother you when you can see through the page to the text printed on the other side?
If you read mass markets, do you try to keep the spine intact and unbroken? Have you ever ripped one in half while on vacation? (You know, if you finish the first 300 pages on the beach and don't want to lug the whole book on the plane, so you rip it apart and leave behind what you've read to tempt the next hotel-stayer.)
With hardcovers, do you notice if the dust jacket has fancy die stamping, raised letters, metallic ink, holographic images, or spot varnish? Does it make you feel better to read a book with lots of fancy detailing like that?
Do you like your endsheets to be plain, colored, or printed? What about textures?
And for the binding, do you like cloth covers, or paper? Do you like the look of the three-piece binding, where the boards are, say, covered in purple paper, and the spine is covered in black? (I think this is a really snazzy look. It's how the Harry Potter books are bound -- and they have a diamond texture on the board sheets, too -- and it's how Dutton treated Marcus Sakey's new novel, The Amateurs, due out August 6. [I just received a copy in the mail, thanks, FF!])
For trade paperbacks, do you like glossy covers or matte? Or do you prefer no coating, but a cover stock with a bit of texture, a little bit of teeth? (I'm thinking of the Alexander McCall Smith books -- I love those way those feel in my hands.)
These all may seem like unimportant little questions, but when I put a book into production, I have to answer every single one of them. I work with printers to create a beautiful, lasting, cost effective book -- and I'm always curious about how all the different options change the final product.
So tell me, am I agonizing over gloss coating for nothing? Or do you, the reader, notice and appreciate the details of the physical book?
Again, how does touching the book itself make you feel, and does it change your experience of the story within?
